


fate, up against your will

by kafkas



Category: The Terror (TV 2018), The Terror - Dan Simmons
Genre: Cannibalism, Deeply Inappropriate Eucharist Allusions, Emotional Manipulation, God Complex, M/M, Opium, Period Typical Attitudes, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-28
Updated: 2018-05-28
Packaged: 2019-05-14 19:19:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14775653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kafkas/pseuds/kafkas
Summary: This will be his greatest conjuring trick yet.





	fate, up against your will

 

As a boy, William had been in possession of what one may’ve deemed a poor constitution – but, then, most everyone in the Old Nichol had been dying of something or other, back in those days. Either they caught it from the cold, or the smog, or the poxy gyspy girls over by Spitalfields. William had spent most of his early childhood in a bed between sweat-stiffened sheets, cosseted in his mother’s arms, and truly, this is not so different. Too sick to move, to eat or sleep. When Cornelius comes to him, he does not throw him off. They are alone but for Manson, who, even if he weren’t snoring, is so thick-headed he’d be harder pressed to decipher what he’d seen than pious Lieutenant Irving.

Outside, the men on watch are singing songs to keep themselves awake; parlour tunes so oft misheard throughout their years entrenched in the ice that they are doubtless now mangled beyond recognition.

_The last link has broken that bound me to thee / And the words thou hast spoken have rendered me free –_

Cornelius’s mouth against the back of William’s neck is hot and damp and try as he might, he cannot help but think of the Thing out there on the ice, with its carrion breath, its gaping maw. But the voice in his ear is soft, and the hand that strokes him gentle.

‘There’s a good love, there’s a pet.’

They are puerile words only a lame old dog like Neptune might find pleasure in, and they awaken something sick and roiling in William. If he strains his eyes, he can just make out the captain’s lightning rods through the uneven canvas, the strange boundary-line they form about the tents. In the light of the oil lamps, they throw off eerie shadows, thin and wavering like a troupe of pagan dancers. _Spitalfields_ , he thinks, nonsensically. _Gypsies._

When Cornelius spends, bucking feverishly against his back, he breaks the skin of William’s shoulder biting down on his moans. And when he apologizes, smiling blithely, his teeth are lacquered wet and pink with blood. William doesn’t think he looks very sorry at all.

 

**__________**

 

 

The clementine sits in the cradle of Hickey’s palms like a particularly large sphere of bullion, iridescent in the darkness of the fo’c’sle. William stares, agape. He can’t help it. It’s been five months since they last left port in Stromness. Five months of slate grey and cold, unfeeling blue.

‘Where’d y’get that then?’

Hickey, smiling like a magician, reaches into a pocket for his penknife. In such close proximity, the pale flash of the blade between them sends fingers of ice down William’s spine. But Hickey is only sawing away the stem.

‘You didn’t steal it, did you, Cornelius? Not from Mister Diggle’s hold?’

‘So what if I did?’ Hickey’s eyes glitter like cut glass, bright and hard. ‘Who is he to withhold such things from us?’

‘They’ll have you cut for it.’

‘Rapped across the knuckles by our boryeyed captain. I’m shaking like a leaf.’ Hickey’s expression gentles. It’s a look he seems able to turn on and off at will. ‘Poor Billy, always fretting. Anyone’d think you were soft on me.’

He watches, apprehensive, as Hickey’s fingernails dig into the rind with a dry, tearing sound. There is a sudden burst of red pulp, spidering white pith. Citrus floods William’s nostrils, a smell so unfamiliar, so far removed from their vile antiscorbutic, that his stomach keens like a kicked animal.

Hickey chuckles. Over the creak and groan of the ship, he hears it too. ‘My mam would sometimes put one of these in our stockings, come Christmastime,’ he says, sighing dreamily, ‘Way I figured it, they’re a fruit for sharing.’

Carefully, he places three of the segments into William’s hand and folds his numbing fingers over them. It’s an intimate gesture; something that, yes, a mother might do – or maybe a –

William looks away sharply. That his mind is preoccupied with such sordid imaginings is only proof that they have been pottering about in this frozen wasteland for far too long.

The caulker’s mate smiles in his arch, knowing way, and William wonders if he might just see right through him.

‘Merry Christmas, Mister Gibson.’

 

He knows that Cornelius Hickey is a sodomite – has gathered the impression from the warning glances thrown his way across the mess table. Knows also, if Sergeant Tozer’s more tawdry remarks are to be taken in earnest, that he’s out to bugger William too. Strangely, the attention doesn’t discomfort him – not so long as his loneliness is being assuaged. William is a steward, so unless there’s a plate of food in his hand – or, in the captain’s case, a decanter of whisky – he is essentially invisible. Hickey smiles at him, claps him on the shoulder. Hickey calls him _Billy_. Nobody has called him Billy in years.

Hickey’s kindness gives William cause to overlook, too, his lies, for William knows Hickey lies. There are certain inconsistencies to his past that cannot be overlooked – how one day he’ll have grown up on a farm on the outskirts of Limerick, and the next it’s in a Liverpool tannery. Sometimes he has sisters, other times a twin brother. Often he will talk about his mam, though William very much doubts the saintly woman he describes is at all rooted in reality. Once or twice he even mentions a dead wife, Louisa, and – well.

The lying doesn’t perturb him because he knows Hickey isn’t really truly trying to fool him. He could if he wanted to – William has never seen somebody concoct a tale with such inborn ease, shirking duties and palming the blame off onto other, more low-ranking officers. Is it narcissism or ignominy? It is possible he’s not even aware of himself?

Sometimes, when they are stood on watch together, or working in the shadowed stores, Hickey will say things that William knows are undeniably true. That he’d lied in his papers and has never served on an ocean vessel before. That he was beaten mercilessly as a child. That he’s killed.

William could report it to Crozier. _Should_ report it to Crozier. A ship is no place for a man with such violence festering within him. But Hickey’s voice when he speaks of such things is simple and plaintive – not at all proud. And his gaze has a hungry, searching quality to it that William recognizes in his own. He thinks, perhaps, that Hickey is lonely too.

 

‘When we punch through –’ Not _if_ , but _when_. His conviction is implacable. ‘When we punch through, are going t’stay on?’

William, stood half-asleep in his winter slops, glances up. Hickey’s arms are slung over the taffrail and he’s staring out to sea with a queer look, happier than he has any right to be, duty owing as he is.

‘You’re not?’ The thought saddens William.

‘In California, the hills are full of gold,’ Hickey continues, oblivious, ‘Virgin beaches of pure white sand, and not a scrap of shale for miles around. A man could make something of himself, in a place like that.’

‘I’ll be having your pay, then.’

Hickey’s eyes crease at the corners, vulpine. ‘Y’could come with me, Billy.’

William scoffs. The very idea of it – deserting the service, his family; joining Hickey in one of his hackneyed schemes – amuses him immensely, in the way childish diversions are wont to do.

Hickey, however, is deadly serious. ‘Does it ever occur to you, the absurdity of what we’re doing here?’

As if to illustrate his point, the sun – perversely slow to set in this Arctic summer – finally disappears beneath the horizon, light and warmth winking out along with it as quickly as one might dim a lamp. William shudders and balls his hands into the pockets of his greatcoat.

‘A man sails halfway around the world, risking life and limb, and, having come out on the other side miraculously unscathed, what does he do?’ Hickey crinkles his nose, ‘He stops and immediately sails back from whence he came. Now, the admiralty might call that man a hero, but me? I say he’s a fool.’

Shivering in the blue dark, William can’t help but agree.

 

 

If Hickey’s philosophical musings ever stray beyond this casual disdain for navy, monarchy, and country then William is not made privy to it. Entombed in ice, the caulker’s mate appears perfectly at ease. If anything, there is a lightness to his spirit that borders on insolence. Does he, too, not lie trembling in his hammock, gritting his teeth against the agonizing screech of the pack? Has he not found himself praying in earnest, as William has, during Sir John’s Sunday services? For safe harbor?

Hickey, he suspects, must enjoy their fear. Enjoys the slackening of order that comes with every month passed in idleness. When he approaches William in the coal store with the oriental matchbook, William doesn’t question it. Hickey is a man of means. Likely he had pilfered it and the cigarillos from some unsuspecting whaler back in Baffin Bay, or else lifted them from an officer’s own private stash.

When he strikes the match, light and smoke pooling golden in the air between them, William smells clove oil and labdanum and is immediately transported back to his family’s dry cellar in London. He is ashamed by how quickly saliva pools behind his gums at the memory, and by how easily he has let himself be dazzled by this conjuring trick, a thing performed seemingly for William’s liking alone.

Hickey’s grin scythes a silvery crescent through the dark. ‘ _And close your eyes with holy dread / For he on honeydew hath fed / And drunk the milk of paradise_.’

‘You’re mad.’

Hickey shrugs, taking a quick draw. He does not dispute it.

‘You’ll be ill,’ William persists.

‘If it’s good enough for Doctor Peddie, then it’s good enough for Mister Hickey.’

The caulker’s mate sniggers lowly, watching from his slump against the hull as William frets and paces.

‘Won’t you indulge yourself?’

‘I’m not ‘sposed to be down here, and it’s –’

‘Depraved?’ Hickey quirks an eyebrow, ‘Or dirtied, perhaps, coming through my hands?’

‘You know that’s not what I meant,’ William says, softening his tone. He knows Hickey. Knows his pettish nature, the ways in which he might twist the smallest slight into a betrayal of biblical proportions. ‘That’s not what I meant at all.’

‘Indulge _me_ , then,’ Hickey says, and before William can offer further protest, there is a hand cupped round his neck, and a thumb nudging open his jaw. Hickey breathes smoke into his mouth like a dragon of avarice and William is helpless to do anything but quake where he stands, vertiginous, rabbit-hearted. In the forefront of his mind he is acutely aware of the footsteps of the men above them; of other, more sordid details – that they are both standing in bilge water, that, if William strains his ears, he can hear a bolus of rats seething its way across the dead-room floor.

Hickey, drawing back, gazes at him in a drowsy, self-satisfied manner, fingers still curled loosely against William’s hammering pulse.

‘There.’ Here, his whimsical boy’s smile. ‘Now you can tell them I pressed you.’

 

 

There were words in the Nichol for men who preferred the company of other men. Words that make William’s ears burn to recall as he lies curled in his haybox of a bed, thinking desperately of anything but the tropical heat of Hickey’s mouth. It is this memory that has sustained him in his baser moments and tortured him by light of day for many weeks now; the calloused pad of a thumb, the white-gold fan of lashes across a cheekbone – ever the more elusive, for of course Hickey is toying with William, now that he has him in his grasp.

No more does the caulker’s mate accompany him about his duties, or seek him out at the mess table. When they cross paths he is so unnervingly polite that William is forced for the first time to acknowledge his rank – a superiority he had never paid much heed to when they were just – what?

Skulking about in the hold?

Planning on running away together?

The more William dwells on them, the more their past exchanges begin to take on a different tact. It is his duty, then, to set matters straight, and to nip in the bud whatever misguided perceptions Hickey has formed in regards to their friendship.

At least, this is what William tells himself. The fact of the matter is that he is a coward, and that, when Hickey comes to caulk the fissure he himself had gouged into the wall of his berth, William merely sits hunched over his bureau and pretends to examine the menu Mister Diggle has devised for the officers. It is Hickey who speaks, after William has thanked him for his service and returned to his work.

‘I behaved inappropriately.’ The high, false voice he uses when he has been caught playing truant. ‘It shan’t happen again. Though, if you should choose to report me to Captain Crozier I would not hold –’

‘For pity’s sake, Cornelius, I won’t have them lash you!’ William whirls, offended, and is struck by the look of surprise on Hickey’s face. Perhaps he has not been being coy with William. Perhaps he truly is reticent.

‘You’d be perfectly within your rights.’

‘I do not _want_ you to be –’ William pauses. His throat has gone dry. ‘I do not wish for you to be punished for your predilections. They are your concern.’

‘Yours too, now,’ Hickey says, self-deprecatingly.

William purses his lips. Even as he turns away, he can see Hickey approach him in the vanity mirror, can feel his hand as it comes to rest on the back of his chair. Regarding him through glass like this – seeing but not being seen – William can glimpse what it is about the caulker’s mate that cows lesser men into nervous silence.

‘You’re so terribly good to me, Billy. I’d like it if we could remain friends.’ His smile is perfectly placid, though his voice, when he next speaks, has an evocative edge to it. ‘Though, to be truthful, I don’t believe it to be friendship that you seek. Least-most from a man such as me.’

 

 

It is, in the end, decided with little fanfare. There is a game of cricket out on the ice, and the ship is all but deserted excepting those duty owing. After an exchange of glances in the mess, William calmly finishes his breakfast and then follows Hickey to the boiler room.

His fingers, after almost a year of watching him pick pockets and swipe rations, are unsurprisingly nimble. It is not this that stuns him, but the tenderness with which he tilts William’s face from side to side and, solemn as a priest at a baptism, kisses his brow, cheeks, and mouth.

‘I’ve never –’ he whispers into William’s neck, and then decides against finishing the thought. Reaching under his slops, he grasps the length of him and strokes with a surety that belies whatever failings he’d been about to allude to. William hisses and jolts backward, smacking his head against the rafters.

‘ _Christ_.’

‘Careful there, or Sir John might hear you.’

‘If Sir John walked in on us now,’ William laughs, strangely giddy, ‘I think the last thing he’d have me cut for is blaspheming.’

Unconcerned, Hickey shrugs off his suspenders, a gesture that should not look to William as erotic as it does.

‘Not just cut,’ he continues, distracted, ‘but flogged. Bare-arsed from fleet to fleet, and that’s if the captain doesn’t decide to hang us.’

‘You think too much,’ Hickey murmurs, licking a stripe down his throat, ‘What we’re doing here, Billy – this is not a thing for thinking –’ He bites him, then, just beneath the line of his collar, and William’s legs almost give out on him. He has not been touched kindly – has not been anything beyond jostled in hallways and clicked at for refills – in what feels like an eternity. And now here is Hickey, sinking to his knees before him. Hickey, mouthing at him through his under things. Hickey – who he knows despises weakness, despises capitulation – taking him on his tongue.

 _For I was hungry and ye fed me_ , William thinks, deliriously.

_For I was thirsty and ye gave me drink._

 

**__________**

 

 

Round their low table they sit and eat in silence – the fool, Hodgson, picking morsels from his fine china plate, a pantomime of decorum which Hickey has seen fit to allow if only because the lieutenant is a doubting Thomas. Soon he too will appreciate the magnitude of their predicament, and be grateful to Hickey for delivering them from such a grim fate as that which awaits Captain Crozier and his men.

A gust of wind buffets the distant tents’ canvas and sends a spray of shale trickling their way. Somebody begins to retch but is quickly silenced.

Hickey remains unruffled. These petty little creatures cannot be faulted for their ignorance. After all, it is a weighty appeal to make: that one might comprehend the divine. Soon Hickey will commune with the Tuunbaq and then they will recognize the holy path that lies before them. That each of them might be reborn upon a plane far removed from this barren wilderness, and walk like gods amongst men.

Smiling to himself, he takes another piece of Billy on his tongue and chews, ponderously. It had of course been unfortunate, that Billy should be the first of them to fall. Hickey had rather been hoping for Manson or Des Voeux, else some other sycophant he had little love for.

It is of no consequence, however. Come Hickey’s ascension, he will resurrect Billy the way he was before the sickness, before _Terror_ , and Billy will understand that he’d only been trying to spare him his wounds. Billy will forgive him, as he has always forgiven Hickey his trespasses, and together they will walk like gods.

They’ll all see. This will be his greatest conjuring trick yet.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> [♫](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQVmqGdkmHY)


End file.
